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Stop Ruining It

seths.blog

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Re: Stop Ruining It

#51

Post by hemogloben »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #12
dijksterhuis wrote: post #2

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place. also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it. so…

I think it depends on what exactly happened. If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air. But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wro…

An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

Re: Stop Ruining It

#52

Post by fsckboy »

elevation wrote: post #22
fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

Re: Stop Ruining It

#53

Post by SoftTalker »

graemep wrote: post #21
Hugsbox wrote: post #6

> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…

Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.

Except for targeted online ads based on browsing/search history or other spying, most advertising is just brand/product awareness, hoping to create a memorable impression.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#54

Post by osjdiwnfiwjfi »

ShadowOfThePit wrote: post #26
fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

Of the things that you could complain about modern Explorer and Notepad, you choose tabs? Really? A handy QoL feature that many have been requesting?

Gotta keep the “I’m such a greybeard, I do things more clumsily than others but look how techy and old school I am” act somehow, right?

Re: Stop Ruining It

#55

Post by munificent »

Syzygies wrote: post #34
munificent wrote: post #29

Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight. By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe. But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended…

There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role. In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.

Beautiful metaphor.

I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#56

Post by osjdiwnfiwjfi »

ryandrake wrote: post #48
mft_ wrote: post #40

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment , created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't…

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread.

No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#57

Post by austinthetaco »

ryandrake wrote: post #48
mft_ wrote: post #40

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment , created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't…

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#58

Post by soupspaces »

Hugsbox wrote: post #6

> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody. Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drov…

What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?

Re: Stop Ruining It

#59

Post by vitally3643 »

ryandrake wrote: post #48
mft_ wrote: post #40

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment , created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't…

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#60

Post by munificent »

ryandrake wrote: post #48
mft_ wrote: post #40

In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment". People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment , created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation. So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people". This isn't…

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

> I'm not sure when it happened

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

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